On Apr 26, 2009, at 7:09 PM, Anne Keller-Smith wrote:
> The reason to do this would be that if you back up the System every > day, would you not be backing up whatever errors have crept into it, > thereby rendering the backup problematic when a problem occurs? This is a separate issue entirely. Errors do not 'creep into a system'. Computers are not organic things; when they fail, they fail in knowable ways due to deliberate activities. They may fail in subtle, difficult to identify ways, but in general when computer systems fail they fail because: Buggy software has been installed. Hardware is failing. With OS X the first is relatively simple to identify. If a problem is not noted by a different user on the system, or cannot be reproduced in Safe mode, then the issue is most likely buggy, third party software or corrupted caches. Caches get corrupted when there's problems writing or reading to/from disk (either from disk hardware problems or abrupt shutdowns). Clearing these (starting in safe mode, dumping browser caches, or running AppleJack to 'deep clean' things) often fixes the problem. This partially solved a nagging slowdown problem I had been having with my laptop, along with getting Flash crap under control in my browser. Hardware problems will increasingly become the issue with computers germane to this list...the very newest of them (the last G5 towers) are now approaching 4 years old, the oldest (the B&W G3) are ten years old. I'm tempting the LEM "endless idiotic UPS thread" curse here, but one of the best investments you can ever make for your computer system is a good, professional-grade uninterruptible power system, one that also conditions the power (you'll spend $120-$400 for one of these) Completely aside from the issue of protecting against power surges, they provide clean, design-spec power to the system. Electricity is the fuel for a computer, clean fuel == fewer problems. I've seen them work over 15 years as an IT professional. All this said, OSX is a remarkably stable and robust OS. I'm convinced that many of the problems people experience with OS X are the result of excessive tinkering, insufficient testing of new software (don't go installing three new pref panes and four new drivers at once.), too many 'switch off the power to shut down instead of shutting down properly' incidents and poor power leading to hardware faults. I know this because my own systems rarely experience the issues we see here, and mine are hardly pristine state of the art systems: an upgraded G4 that lived through a flood (The boot drive has been with me since my computer was a Beige G3 running 10.2), a frankebook, half 867Mhz/half 1Ghz TiBook, with bits of my old Pismo installed, and an old first-gen Intel iMac. The desktops both live off of APC UPS'es, (A laptop's battery and power brick system comprise, in essence, both parts of a power conditioning UPS) I maintain current backups via Time Machine and that's it. I do no other 'system maintenance' whatsoever: I don't run DiskWarrior, Repair Permissions, Onyx, AppleJack, etc etc etc. As I said, OS X is robust. Leave it the heck alone and it usually runs pretty well all by itself. -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to g3-5-list-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
